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Track 3: The experimental process has begun

The ship is loaded with... play!

30.05.2025

We have now launched Track 3 in our major play program, Moving Museums Through Play (MMTP). The track focuses on competence development and will offer plenty of small experiments—and, hopefully, lots of insights into playful museum experiences—over the next 1.5 years.

Track 3: The experimental process has begun

It might look a bit like an enlarged spiderweb, but it’s actually a game. Developed, hung up, and tested in 10 minutes at Frøslevlejren as part of the first workshop in Track 3.

According to the museum’s brand tracking survey, relatively few expect to encounter playful experiences here—perhaps not surprising given the site’s history.

But in fact, play was part of everyday life in the prisoner camp, and maybe through play, we can better imagine what it was like back then?

This is, at least, one of the things we are exploring together with Design School Kolding in a 1.5-year process. In mid-May, we launched the process aimed at developing knowledge and skills around playful museum experiences across six of the National Museum’s visitor sites.

Experiments across and with audiences at the center


Frilandsmuseet, Frøslevlejrens Museum, Krigsmuseet, Kronborg Castle, the National Museum Copenhagen, and Trelleborg. These are the six visitor sites designated by the National Museum’s management to participate in the process. Two staff members from each site form a core part of the process, which is facilitated by Design School Kolding.

The process is structured as action research and consists of five phases. Action research is an approach where researchers and participants collaborate to investigate and improve practice through action and reflection. Each of the five phases begins with a workshop where participants meet and develop audience experiments, which are then carried out at the individual visitor sites.

The audience is a central part of the process. Fundamentally, the process is about developing knowledge and skills to create playful museum experiences with audiences at the center. MMTP is based on recent design research that emphasizes the situated nature of play:

In MMTP, we see play as something that must be understood based on how it actually takes place in practice. This means we need to observe how play concretely unfolds in the situations and with the target groups we design for. Therefore, we continuously experiment with involving and testing with audiences so that we design based on what they experience as playful and want to participate in,” says project senior researcher Anne Rørbæk Olesen, who leads Track 3.

Experiments across and with audiences at the center

From experiments to change?

 

Many of the participating visitor sites already have considerable experience designing playful museum experiences. The ambition is therefore not only to develop individual staff members’ competencies but also to gather these experiences and learn together across the organization.

The process is structured so that participants in the first three phases carry out a design process including everything from audience research to design and iteration (repetition with improvements), while the last two phases focus on distilling and anchoring the learning from the process within the organization. In this context, participants will conduct an organizational experiment to test whether small changes in, for example, structures, work habits, or meeting formats can make a difference. This may affect individual staff members, but it could also—potentially—lead to larger changes.

It’s exciting to be part of a process where we both build on our experience with playfulness and simultaneously create new knowledge together across the museum. I look forward to seeing what we discover along the way,” says Ulla Hahn Ranmar from the National Museum Copenhagen, who is participating in the process.

And yes, we can’t say exactly what will come out of the process yet. But if, for example, you come across something that looks like an enlarged spiderweb at one of our visitor sites, you might be getting caught up in a playful experiment. And you’re very welcome to play along!

About MMTP

About MMTP

Moving Museums Through Play is a research and dissemination program that explores how we understand, design, and evaluate playful museum experiences. The program is funded by the LEGO Foundation and runs from August 2024 to the end of December 2027.

The program consists of three tracks:

  • Track 1 develops research-based knowledge and evaluates the program.

  • Track 2 develops larger playful museum experiences at The Ships in Holbæk, Kongernes Jelling, and the National Museum Copenhagen.

  • Track 3 develops knowledge and competencies through small experiments across Frilandsmuseet, Frøslevlejrens Museum, Krigsmuseet, Kronborg Castle, the National Museum Copenhagen, and Trelleborg.